Calvino’s dialogue with Hermes-Mercúrio in Invisible Cities

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of five narratives from the book As cidades invisíveis (Invisible Cities) by Ítalo Calvino. Such narratives, gathered under the subtitle “As cidades e as trocas” (“Cities and exchanges”), describe the cities of Euphemia, Chloe, Eutropia, Ercilia and Esmeraldina. Calvino’s book presents eleven subtitles with five narratives each. In the selected group, we identified the presence of mythology, in the figure of the god Mercury, Hermes or Thoth from the Graeco-Roman-Egyptian syncretism, in whom Calvino declared his interest more than once. This reference, which is explicit in Esmeraldina and Eutropia and implicit in Euphemia, Chloe and Ercília, aroused our interest to investigate how the discourse establishes connections with Mercury, considered, among other things, the god of roads, commerce, communication, transformation, exchange and, as he is called by Calvino himself in Eutropia, the “God of the fickle”. Through the examination of themes, figures and isotopies, concepts proposed by French Semiotics (or Greimas’ Semiotics) and their articulation with the notion of interdiscourse, presented by French Discourse Analysis (AD), we sought to verify the dialogue between literary and mythic discourses. Some principles from the Emerald Tablet – text allegedly attributed to Hermes and that designates one of the cities – helped us to confirm this interdiscoursive dialogue that is brought to Calvino’s discourse (the intradiscourse) and that is consistent with recurring themes found in this group of narratives. The analysis also enabled associations with the concept of rhizome, proposed by Guattari & Rolnik, in the figure of Calvino’s description of lines and shapes. This indicates that the book dialogues with both the old and the contemporary, traveling between the memory and the mobility related to the reconfigurations of values and behaviors.